Saturday, 27 June 2009
Each revolution softens in the length of time, and gravitates towards a more pragmatic point. Revolutions devour their own children and, after internal settlements, customs of the pre-revolutionary era are implemented as if they were brand new.In any kind of revolution, cadres don’t remain as they were before; more realists and more pragmatists of these cadres stand out in time. In a sense revolutions also normalize and lose their rigidity. The French Revolution, the 1917 Russian Revolution and other different kinds of ideological and national revolutions can be counted as examples.
Despite all of the fixings, the Iranian Revolution is one of the never-normalized-revolutions. Shortly after the revolution, Iran found itself at war with Iraq. The U.S. and the Soviet Union adopted a position against Iran, and powerful foreign enemies forced Iran to feel besieged. Post-revolutionary policies of Iran have always been survival policies, and Iran has continuously renewed itself under the conditions of revolution, war and defense. Revolutionary ideology transformed into the ideology of war without encountering any challenges of ordinary life; and later the ideology manifested a defense ideology against the hard reactions of the U.S. and more generally the West. During the time the attacks of Israel against Lebanon and Palestine have also been one of the factors to keep the revolution fresh. The Cold War ended, however, the U.S. settled in the Persian Gulf with Saddam Hussein’s attack on Kuwait, and threats of the U.S. against Iran increased. When the U.S. was settling in the Middle East it utilized the threat of Saddam Hussein and on the other hand, by frightening Arabs with the Iran threat, it obtained new bases and rights in the region. During the 1990s Iran was represented as a ‘new threat’ to the world and the dynamics for change did not awaken in Iran because of the hardness of foreign threat. Since it was too busy to respond to foreign threats, even in the period of Hatami, Iran didn’t make an insightful critic.
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